I was
sorry to read that Charles McCarry, a fine spy novelist who had served for 10
years as a deep cover CIA officer, had died. I like all of his novels, but I rank his spy thriller The Tears
of Autumn right up there with Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love and John le Carre’s
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It is that good of a spy thriller.
The New
York Times offers the below in an obituary:
Charles
McCarry, a former C.I.A. agent who used his Cold War experiences to animate his
widely admired espionage novels, notably “The Tears of Autumn,” a best seller
about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died on Tuesday in
Fairfax, Va. He was 88.
His son Caleb said the cause was
complications of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a fall.
The soft-spoken Mr. McCarry
followed other former spies into writing fiction, a group that includes Graham
Greene, Ian Fleming and David Cornwell, who writes under the pseudonym John
le Carré. And over nearly 40 years, Mr. McCarry’s dense plotting,
realistic detail and brisk writing style brought him a reputation as one of
espionage fiction’s leading practitioners.
“McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of
intrigue — by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any
measure,” the political satirist P. J. O’Rourke wrote in
a review of Mr. McCarry’s “Old Boys” (2004) in The Weekly Standard.
You can read the rest of the obit via the
below link:
You can also read more about Charles McCarry
and watch a brief video clip of him via the below link:
mysteriouspress.com/authors/charles-mccarry/default.asp
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